How many participants in an industry do you need to have before you'll say that the goal of competition has been met? Four seems like it would be enough. If there was some advantage to be had by using a price structure that accurately reflects the true cost of text messages then I suspect one of the carriers would have already tried it.
I think what the author meant is that there's no competition until the companies are actually competing. If any one of them lowered their texting prices, the others would have to lower theirs to match or else they'd lose business. This would eventually all of them lowering their prices, keeping the same customers, and making less profit than before. They all realize that as long as they all keep their prices high, they'll all be raking in the profit.
If you've got any local cell providers in your area, take a look at them. They've probably got something like a $40/month plan that includes unlimited minutes and text messages. Of course, they probably don't have a lot of business because you'll lose coverage as soon as you go outside of the local area.
Why is it surpiseing? Is Apple the only company that makes pretty products?
No, it's surprising because most cell phone designs are crappy.
At least, I presume that's why the submitter thinks it's surprisingly nice. I took a look at it and it looks more or less like every other crappy phone design to me. But, to be honest, I hate phones that have half of their face taken up by a tiny keyboard.
Except, of course, Slashdot, which generally stops loading and freezes the program.
How old is your version of Elinks? I remember freezing problems with Slashdot (and a few other sites, gamefaqs.com comes to mind) a long time ago, but I haven't seen any problems for at least several months, maybe a year or so. Then again, I don't use any of the packaged releases, every one in a while I'll get the latest code out of the GIT repository and build it.
girlspeak translation: Get off the damn computer and pay attention to me when I'm around. It's damn rude to have someone over and then leave them to entertain themselves so you can go play a video game. Homework or a few minutes of e-mail, not a big deal... Wasting four hours on a video game because you need to "relax"... It gives a clear message: I'm not wanted. And when it's my boyfriend doing that, then it's elevate to not only aren't I wanted, but that I'm less attractive than a hunk of circuits and plastic. So yeah, most girls are going to be rightly pissed about that!
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound as though I was defending the guy -- just trying to provide some insight as to why he (and many other guys) behave that way. Most guys simply do not understand "girlspeak," and, unless you've found one of the rare ones who does, expecting him to figure it out is just an exercise in frustration.
And yet they wonder why we call it an addiction...
Oh, I certainly don't wonder. I'm sure Blizzard has hired psychologists to figure out the optimal effort:reward ratio to keep people playing as long as possible. MMORPGs are designed to be addictive by people who understand in great detail how addictions work; that's why telling somebody to stop playing is about as effective as telling an alcoholic to stop drinking.
Yeah, I'll say. I just got done having a three hour bitch fest yesterday with a friend of mine who's BF is 'addicted' to World of Warcraft. She doesn't have a lot of experience with boys (much more with girls -- no comments on this please!), and I've had to mother her a bit on why a boy can sink twenty or more hours a week into a video game and says it "helps me relax and challenges me", but afterwords can't come up with anything better to do than "go bowling" ("where"? "Umm... I'm sure there's one around somewhere"), or "go for a walk".
This may be a silly question, but -- she may have spent three hours bitching to you about it, but has she spent that much time talking to him about it? Nothing is going to change unless he wants to change, and that will not happen unless he understands and accepts that there is a problem.
As a guy, one of the largest frustrations I've had with many (but not all, fortunately) girls is that when something is upsetting them they won't just tell me about it. They might make it obvious that they're upset about something in general, but me being unable to guess exactly what is apparently just another failure on my part. Casually saying something like, "Oh, I wish you'd spend less time playing WoW" doesn't count -- his internal reaction will be "Ok, I'll log off fifteen minutes early today," then he'll shrug and move on.
If the amount of time he spends playing WoW is a serious problem, he needs to be told plainly that it is a serious problem. If he accepts that it's a problem, he can fix it, but otherwise his girlfriend will either have to just accept it or leave him. She's only going to make herself more frustrated if she thinks that he'll change if she just waits long enough.
Keep in mind that the game was designed around the PS2. The Japanese PS2 player base is still huge, and they won't make any changes that they can't implement there.
Seamless transitions between zones would be nigh-impossible, unfortunately, simply due to technical limitations -- the PS2 doesn't have enough RAM and can't load the data fast enough to make transitions seamless. This is on top of the fact that different zones aren't necessarily on the same server, either; for example, mog houses run on their own server, and during the "loading" screen it hands your connection off to the other server, which would be very difficult to do seamlessly without any kind of glitches.
As for WASD movement... well, it's not a limitation, but just another example of how the game was designed around the PS2. The movement and menu systems were designed under the assumption you'd be operating them with a PS2 controller and only using a keyboard to chat; the PC version of the game copied the control scheme perfectly.
Just thought I'd chip in that I feel basically the exact same way as you about FFXI... the game had an absolutely beautiful environment, settings, and story, and the community was fantastic.
But I play WoW nowadays because I just don't have the 4+ hours in a row that were necessary on a regular basis to get anything done in FFXI. I can travel basically anywhere in WoW in a matter of minutes and I can easily solo quests if I don't feel like working in a group or if I just can't find one. I can log on and play for an hour and feel like I've actually accomplished something. Leveling doesn't feel like a grind, and if I get unlucky and die I don't lose hours of progress. Heck, leveling solo wasn't even possible in FFXI unless you were a Beastmaster -- and playing a Hunter in WoW feels like you get all of the best parts of Beastmaster and Ranger with the "easy mode" button turned on at the same time. (to be fair, I heard they made soloing easier since I quit FFXI a couple years ago, but still I doubt that it's yet as easy as WoW)
On the other hand, WoW's community is frequently very immature compared to FFXI's, and even at the max level there are a lot of people who don't understand their role in a party and don't know how to work with other players. People who think any of the instances in WoW are "hard" would go home crying if they had to fight something like Absolute Virtue.
If I could afford to devote 4 hours a day to FFXI I might still be playing it, but for now it's WoW for me.
Try Mythbuntu. I've installed it on three systems now and it's very easy to get working. I have never had to actually touch MySQL, let alone manually create a database, and the only time I've had to look in the MythTV docs was when I wanted to reconfigure a few buttons on my remote.
While NAT is not a be-all end-all security measure, it certainly helps
No it doesn't. It's not a security measure at all. Having your computers behind a NAT provides absolutely no advantage over having public IPs behind a router that disallows incoming connections by default. The only difference is that in one situation you have to set up port forwarding to allow any incoming connections, and in the other you just have to allow connections on a particular port to a particular IP. Oh, and you can't have multiple computers that listen on the same incoming port if you're using NAT.
Port scanning would be practically infeasible with IPv6, anyway; the address space is so large that even your own little subnet would take longer to scan than any potential attacker would be willing to spend.
My router is the drawbridge of my castle.
And you will still have a router whether or not you use NAT.
For something as simple as an XMPP server, this is way overkill,
Have you ever looked at the XMPP spec? If you try to actually implement all of the provided features, it's not simple at all. It's massive. We actually used to use jabberd at our workplace and constantly ran into unimplemented features, and configuration and administration were both far more complex than they needed to be. To be fair, it was probably at least a year ago, so maybe they've gotten better...
Most of those requirements are pretty basic things that you would already have if you used any java applications, too. You could also say that jabberd is too complex because compiling it is going to require that you have gcc, libc, make, automake, autoconf, and so forth. And if you're not going to compile it from source (what's the point for a Java app?), all you really need is a JRE.
Everybody is saying "Pidgin", but a client won't do you any good without a server to connect to, and if you really care about being secure, you shouldn't trust any third-party server that is publicly accessible.
You should probably set up your own Jabber server; I recommend Openfire, which is open source, easy to install, and pretty powerful. It is possible to mandate that all clients must use encryption to connect, which will do a pretty good job of keeping things secure, and you can use any XMPP client that supports encryption. If you don't want even the server to be able to read your messages, as others have suggested, installing an OTR plugin for your client is the way to go.
The poster is a student at his 'university', not involved in the decision-making process.
Where did he say that he wasn't involved in the decision-making process? Based on the rest of the submission, I'd guess that he's on the committee that's making the decision. Maybe you should stop trolling.
Think about it this way: 1/2 the people in this country are, definitionally, of below average intelligence, and even the average isn't that great.
No, half of the people in this country are at or below median intelligence. It's entirely possible for more than half the people to be above or below average. For example, if we take four numbers -- 10, 9, 8, 1 -- the average of those is 7. Three of those (75%) are above average. Only one is below average. Understand now?
For what it's worth, your experience might be an exception. I recently acquired a couple of Inspiron 1525N's at work, and all of their wireless adapters worked perfectly out of the box.
To be fair, though, the volume control didn't work, and I had to unload the winmodem driver to get it working.
You can back up most save games to an SD card, however there are some games you can't - SSBB and Mario Kart, and probably others too. I have no idea why these saves are "special", but they are. Maybe something to do with unlocking new content or something?
Nintendo doesn't allow games that have online play to be copied. The official stance is that it's because this would enable cheating; in games that have changing characters or tradeable items and equipment, it could facilitate the duplication of that equipment, but I have no idea how one would go about copying a game to cheat in SSBB's crippled online mode. Nonetheless, that's the official word.
Re:480p Wii Sucks (mod parent up!)
on
HD Wii By 2011?
·
· Score: 1
I don't normally make "mod parent up" posts, but seriously, Tales of Vesperia is gorgeous in 720p. (and probably 1080p, too, but my TV won't do that) The whole "HD only matters for realistic graphics" argument is BS.
Don't get me wrong, I have a Wii and love it, but the difference in graphical power between it and the other systems shows no matter what type of game you're playing.
Eighth Grade students are not useful and productive members of society.
Damn straight. That means they have no rights and should be treated like objects, just like homeless people, terminally ill patients, and old people who just live off of social security without doing anything. Right?
When your parents' retirement home decides that they're too expensive and just tosses them in a dumpster out back, remember, it's ok because they're not useful and productive members of society.
you can do anything on the PC that you can do on the Mac.
Huh, I can modify and compile my own Windows kernel?... no? Can I boot up my PC into a target disk mode that lets other computers access it as an external hard drive via firewire?... no? Mount a ZFS filesystem?...no? Write programs that use a POSIX API?... only if I use a fairly slow, buggy middle layer?
There are lots of things you can do in OS X that you can't do in Windows. Should I list more?
And no, you can't "work faster" on the Mac than you can on Windows
I find it interesting that you are familiar with my work habits and needs and know exactly how fast I can work in different operating systems. Are you a stalker?
With an MMO, you get to pay to work a second full time job. Your duties will include: (senseless trolling)
You're quite adept at reposting old, inflammatory arguments, but -- why does any of that matter? If you have fun playing the game, then it's not a waste of time. If you don't have fun... then go do something else (which will probably, in the long run, be more expensive than WoW, as multiple people here have illustrated). Please, list your hobbies so that I can mock them childishly and tell you how I don't think they're any fun at all, and, therefore, you shouldn't, either.
A week on a cruise hanging out in an exotic remote location, and interacting with people, local culture, trying new foods, etc is well worth $800 more so than sitting in the basement playing a computer game for 4 years.
You appear to misunderstand. I'm not saying that playing WoW is better than going on a cruise. I'm saying that it's several orders of magnitude cheaper and still fun. That may be difficult to understand if you have so much money that you can afford to constantly go on cruises for four years.
As the other poster commented, $800 is a great deal for 4 years of entertainment. You can go on cruises or trips to resorts that will cost you more than that after only a week or two, and the only things you'll have to show for it when you come back are a sunburn and a t-shirt.
Or, to compare that price to other video games: let's say that your average single player action game provides a max of 20 hours of entertainment, and your average single player RPG provides a max of 40. If you play a mix of the genres 10 hours a week (perfectly reasonable for a casual gamer, and way under the norm for a "hardcore" gamer), you'll go through an average of 1 game every 3 weeks. With a typical game costing $50, you'll spend over $1700 on games in two years. WoW is way cheaper than playing single player games.
Your first two arguments are unprovable flamebait, and the last is a matter of opinion. There are lots of people who think it's fast, stable, and just complicated enough.
It's got an ugly, messy desktop environment and it doesn't come with any decent usable software.
Again, the first is a matter of opinion, and I would think you could at least realize that you're in the minority. Lots of people think the desktop is pretty and well-organized. The last is, again, flamebait. It may not come with as much as your typical Linux distribution, but Safari, Pages, Mail, iTunes, Xcode, DVD Player, and the various iLife apps, among others, are far from unusuable or indecent. And, despite the fact that it doesn't come with as much as your typical Linux distribution, there are many thousands of free and open source programs that you can install.
It's got this weird browser that doesn't render stuff, doesn't have AdBlock and which usually gets replaced with Firefox.
"Doesn't render stuff" is, again, unproveable flamebait. Safari does just fine in rendering tests. You're also showing off your ignorance, as it does have AdBlock. Come on, that's the first link in Google.
It can't play back most videos or music files without expensive shareware.
This is just wrong and uninformed. Those are just examples off the top of my head that I like, there are plenty of other free and open source players out there.
It doesn't even have a usable text editor!
What about TextEdit and Pages is not usable?
If those are too flashy for you, just install vim or emacs. They work fine.
It's utter crap. Ubuntu is already better than Mac OSX. Please don't try to make another crappy OSX Aqua-looky-likey clone thing.
You clearly do not even know what you're talking about. Please spend some time using OS X or at least do a bit of research before you try to troll again.
I'm not normally a grammer nazi, but this one has me curious. Is "architected" actualy a word? I'm american, could it be a different dialect (british, ausie, etc.)? It's also possible that the Intel employee quoted isn't a native english speaker but I'd love for someone to clarify.
Slashdot Mirror
How many participants in an industry do you need to have before you'll say that the goal of competition has been met? Four seems like it would be enough. If there was some advantage to be had by using a price structure that accurately reflects the true cost of text messages then I suspect one of the carriers would have already tried it.
I think what the author meant is that there's no competition until the companies are actually competing. If any one of them lowered their texting prices, the others would have to lower theirs to match or else they'd lose business. This would eventually all of them lowering their prices, keeping the same customers, and making less profit than before. They all realize that as long as they all keep their prices high, they'll all be raking in the profit.
If you've got any local cell providers in your area, take a look at them. They've probably got something like a $40/month plan that includes unlimited minutes and text messages. Of course, they probably don't have a lot of business because you'll lose coverage as soon as you go outside of the local area.
Why is it surpiseing? Is Apple the only company that makes pretty products?
No, it's surprising because most cell phone designs are crappy.
At least, I presume that's why the submitter thinks it's surprisingly nice. I took a look at it and it looks more or less like every other crappy phone design to me. But, to be honest, I hate phones that have half of their face taken up by a tiny keyboard.
Except, of course, Slashdot, which generally stops loading and freezes the program.
How old is your version of Elinks? I remember freezing problems with Slashdot (and a few other sites, gamefaqs.com comes to mind) a long time ago, but I haven't seen any problems for at least several months, maybe a year or so. Then again, I don't use any of the packaged releases, every one in a while I'll get the latest code out of the GIT repository and build it.
girlspeak translation: Get off the damn computer and pay attention to me when I'm around. It's damn rude to have someone over and then leave them to entertain themselves so you can go play a video game. Homework or a few minutes of e-mail, not a big deal... Wasting four hours on a video game because you need to "relax"... It gives a clear message: I'm not wanted. And when it's my boyfriend doing that, then it's elevate to not only aren't I wanted, but that I'm less attractive than a hunk of circuits and plastic. So yeah, most girls are going to be rightly pissed about that!
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound as though I was defending the guy -- just trying to provide some insight as to why he (and many other guys) behave that way. Most guys simply do not understand "girlspeak," and, unless you've found one of the rare ones who does, expecting him to figure it out is just an exercise in frustration.
And yet they wonder why we call it an addiction...
Oh, I certainly don't wonder. I'm sure Blizzard has hired psychologists to figure out the optimal effort:reward ratio to keep people playing as long as possible. MMORPGs are designed to be addictive by people who understand in great detail how addictions work; that's why telling somebody to stop playing is about as effective as telling an alcoholic to stop drinking.
Yeah, I'll say. I just got done having a three hour bitch fest yesterday with a friend of mine who's BF is 'addicted' to World of Warcraft. She doesn't have a lot of experience with boys (much more with girls -- no comments on this please!), and I've had to mother her a bit on why a boy can sink twenty or more hours a week into a video game and says it "helps me relax and challenges me", but afterwords can't come up with anything better to do than "go bowling" ("where"? "Umm... I'm sure there's one around somewhere"), or "go for a walk".
This may be a silly question, but -- she may have spent three hours bitching to you about it, but has she spent that much time talking to him about it? Nothing is going to change unless he wants to change, and that will not happen unless he understands and accepts that there is a problem.
As a guy, one of the largest frustrations I've had with many (but not all, fortunately) girls is that when something is upsetting them they won't just tell me about it. They might make it obvious that they're upset about something in general, but me being unable to guess exactly what is apparently just another failure on my part. Casually saying something like, "Oh, I wish you'd spend less time playing WoW" doesn't count -- his internal reaction will be "Ok, I'll log off fifteen minutes early today," then he'll shrug and move on.
If the amount of time he spends playing WoW is a serious problem, he needs to be told plainly that it is a serious problem. If he accepts that it's a problem, he can fix it, but otherwise his girlfriend will either have to just accept it or leave him. She's only going to make herself more frustrated if she thinks that he'll change if she just waits long enough.
Keep in mind that the game was designed around the PS2. The Japanese PS2 player base is still huge, and they won't make any changes that they can't implement there.
Seamless transitions between zones would be nigh-impossible, unfortunately, simply due to technical limitations -- the PS2 doesn't have enough RAM and can't load the data fast enough to make transitions seamless. This is on top of the fact that different zones aren't necessarily on the same server, either; for example, mog houses run on their own server, and during the "loading" screen it hands your connection off to the other server, which would be very difficult to do seamlessly without any kind of glitches.
As for WASD movement... well, it's not a limitation, but just another example of how the game was designed around the PS2. The movement and menu systems were designed under the assumption you'd be operating them with a PS2 controller and only using a keyboard to chat; the PC version of the game copied the control scheme perfectly.
Just thought I'd chip in that I feel basically the exact same way as you about FFXI... the game had an absolutely beautiful environment, settings, and story, and the community was fantastic.
But I play WoW nowadays because I just don't have the 4+ hours in a row that were necessary on a regular basis to get anything done in FFXI. I can travel basically anywhere in WoW in a matter of minutes and I can easily solo quests if I don't feel like working in a group or if I just can't find one. I can log on and play for an hour and feel like I've actually accomplished something. Leveling doesn't feel like a grind, and if I get unlucky and die I don't lose hours of progress. Heck, leveling solo wasn't even possible in FFXI unless you were a Beastmaster -- and playing a Hunter in WoW feels like you get all of the best parts of Beastmaster and Ranger with the "easy mode" button turned on at the same time. (to be fair, I heard they made soloing easier since I quit FFXI a couple years ago, but still I doubt that it's yet as easy as WoW)
On the other hand, WoW's community is frequently very immature compared to FFXI's, and even at the max level there are a lot of people who don't understand their role in a party and don't know how to work with other players. People who think any of the instances in WoW are "hard" would go home crying if they had to fight something like Absolute Virtue.
If I could afford to devote 4 hours a day to FFXI I might still be playing it, but for now it's WoW for me.
Apple has had Java 1.6 available for download for at least 6 months.
But only if you're using a 64-bit Intel system. Anybody on a 32-bit Intel (still a lot of people) or a PPC system (still a few people) is out of luck.
Try Mythbuntu. I've installed it on three systems now and it's very easy to get working. I have never had to actually touch MySQL, let alone manually create a database, and the only time I've had to look in the MythTV docs was when I wanted to reconfigure a few buttons on my remote.
While NAT is not a be-all end-all security measure, it certainly helps
No it doesn't. It's not a security measure at all. Having your computers behind a NAT provides absolutely no advantage over having public IPs behind a router that disallows incoming connections by default. The only difference is that in one situation you have to set up port forwarding to allow any incoming connections, and in the other you just have to allow connections on a particular port to a particular IP. Oh, and you can't have multiple computers that listen on the same incoming port if you're using NAT.
Port scanning would be practically infeasible with IPv6, anyway; the address space is so large that even your own little subnet would take longer to scan than any potential attacker would be willing to spend.
My router is the drawbridge of my castle.
And you will still have a router whether or not you use NAT.
For something as simple as an XMPP server, this is way overkill,
Have you ever looked at the XMPP spec? If you try to actually implement all of the provided features, it's not simple at all. It's massive. We actually used to use jabberd at our workplace and constantly ran into unimplemented features, and configuration and administration were both far more complex than they needed to be. To be fair, it was probably at least a year ago, so maybe they've gotten better...
Most of those requirements are pretty basic things that you would already have if you used any java applications, too. You could also say that jabberd is too complex because compiling it is going to require that you have gcc, libc, make, automake, autoconf, and so forth. And if you're not going to compile it from source (what's the point for a Java app?), all you really need is a JRE.
Everybody is saying "Pidgin", but a client won't do you any good without a server to connect to, and if you really care about being secure, you shouldn't trust any third-party server that is publicly accessible.
You should probably set up your own Jabber server; I recommend Openfire, which is open source, easy to install, and pretty powerful. It is possible to mandate that all clients must use encryption to connect, which will do a pretty good job of keeping things secure, and you can use any XMPP client that supports encryption. If you don't want even the server to be able to read your messages, as others have suggested, installing an OTR plugin for your client is the way to go.
The poster is a student at his 'university', not involved in the decision-making process.
Where did he say that he wasn't involved in the decision-making process? Based on the rest of the submission, I'd guess that he's on the committee that's making the decision. Maybe you should stop trolling.
Think about it this way: 1/2 the people in this country are, definitionally, of below average intelligence, and even the average isn't that great.
No, half of the people in this country are at or below median intelligence. It's entirely possible for more than half the people to be above or below average. For example, if we take four numbers -- 10, 9, 8, 1 -- the average of those is 7. Three of those (75%) are above average. Only one is below average. Understand now?
For what it's worth, your experience might be an exception. I recently acquired a couple of Inspiron 1525N's at work, and all of their wireless adapters worked perfectly out of the box.
To be fair, though, the volume control didn't work, and I had to unload the winmodem driver to get it working.
You can back up most save games to an SD card, however there are some games you can't - SSBB and Mario Kart, and probably others too. I have no idea why these saves are "special", but they are. Maybe something to do with unlocking new content or something?
Nintendo doesn't allow games that have online play to be copied. The official stance is that it's because this would enable cheating; in games that have changing characters or tradeable items and equipment, it could facilitate the duplication of that equipment, but I have no idea how one would go about copying a game to cheat in SSBB's crippled online mode. Nonetheless, that's the official word.
I don't normally make "mod parent up" posts, but seriously, Tales of Vesperia is gorgeous in 720p. (and probably 1080p, too, but my TV won't do that) The whole "HD only matters for realistic graphics" argument is BS.
Don't get me wrong, I have a Wii and love it, but the difference in graphical power between it and the other systems shows no matter what type of game you're playing.
I've encountered so far one bolt that clearly needs sliding to get to it
Actually, you can use Hornet Man's weapon to get it. No sliding necessary!
Eighth Grade students are not useful and productive members of society.
Damn straight. That means they have no rights and should be treated like objects, just like homeless people, terminally ill patients, and old people who just live off of social security without doing anything. Right?
When your parents' retirement home decides that they're too expensive and just tosses them in a dumpster out back, remember, it's ok because they're not useful and productive members of society.
you can do anything on the PC that you can do on the Mac.
Huh, I can modify and compile my own Windows kernel? ... no? Can I boot up my PC into a target disk mode that lets other computers access it as an external hard drive via firewire? ... no? Mount a ZFS filesystem? ...no? Write programs that use a POSIX API? ... only if I use a fairly slow, buggy middle layer?
There are lots of things you can do in OS X that you can't do in Windows. Should I list more?
And no, you can't "work faster" on the Mac than you can on Windows
I find it interesting that you are familiar with my work habits and needs and know exactly how fast I can work in different operating systems. Are you a stalker?
With an MMO, you get to pay to work a second full time job. Your duties will include:
(senseless trolling)
You're quite adept at reposting old, inflammatory arguments, but -- why does any of that matter? If you have fun playing the game, then it's not a waste of time. If you don't have fun... then go do something else (which will probably, in the long run, be more expensive than WoW, as multiple people here have illustrated). Please, list your hobbies so that I can mock them childishly and tell you how I don't think they're any fun at all, and, therefore, you shouldn't, either.
A week on a cruise hanging out in an exotic remote location, and interacting with people, local culture, trying new foods, etc is well worth $800 more so than sitting in the basement playing a computer game for 4 years.
You appear to misunderstand. I'm not saying that playing WoW is better than going on a cruise. I'm saying that it's several orders of magnitude cheaper and still fun. That may be difficult to understand if you have so much money that you can afford to constantly go on cruises for four years.
As the other poster commented, $800 is a great deal for 4 years of entertainment. You can go on cruises or trips to resorts that will cost you more than that after only a week or two, and the only things you'll have to show for it when you come back are a sunburn and a t-shirt.
Or, to compare that price to other video games: let's say that your average single player action game provides a max of 20 hours of entertainment, and your average single player RPG provides a max of 40. If you play a mix of the genres 10 hours a week (perfectly reasonable for a casual gamer, and way under the norm for a "hardcore" gamer), you'll go through an average of 1 game every 3 weeks. With a typical game costing $50, you'll spend over $1700 on games in two years. WoW is way cheaper than playing single player games.
It's slow, crashy and overcomplicated.
Your first two arguments are unprovable flamebait, and the last is a matter of opinion. There are lots of people who think it's fast, stable, and just complicated enough.
It's got an ugly, messy desktop environment and it doesn't come with any decent usable software.
Again, the first is a matter of opinion, and I would think you could at least realize that you're in the minority. Lots of people think the desktop is pretty and well-organized. The last is, again, flamebait. It may not come with as much as your typical Linux distribution, but Safari, Pages, Mail, iTunes, Xcode, DVD Player, and the various iLife apps, among others, are far from unusuable or indecent. And, despite the fact that it doesn't come with as much as your typical Linux distribution, there are many thousands of free and open source programs that you can install.
It's got this weird browser that doesn't render stuff, doesn't have AdBlock and which usually gets replaced with Firefox.
"Doesn't render stuff" is, again, unproveable flamebait. Safari does just fine in rendering tests. You're also showing off your ignorance, as it does have AdBlock. Come on, that's the first link in Google.
It can't play back most videos or music files without expensive shareware.
This is just wrong and uninformed. Those are just examples off the top of my head that I like, there are plenty of other free and open source players out there.
It doesn't even have a usable text editor!
What about TextEdit and Pages is not usable?
If those are too flashy for you, just install vim or emacs. They work fine.
It's utter crap. Ubuntu is already better than Mac OSX. Please don't try to make another crappy OSX Aqua-looky-likey clone thing.
You clearly do not even know what you're talking about. Please spend some time using OS X or at least do a bit of research before you try to troll again.
I'm not normally a grammer nazi, but this one has me curious. Is "architected" actualy a word? I'm american, could it be a different dialect (british, ausie, etc.)? It's also possible that the Intel employee quoted isn't a native english speaker but I'd love for someone to clarify.
Yep, it's a word! "Architect" can be used as a verb. See right here in the dictionary.